The nurse and the surgeon exchanged puzzled glances at this unforeshadowed remark.

“But” — Clara seemed just as astonished — “but you’re teaching me! You’re teaching me all the time !”

28

Howson was still pondering that when the nurse gently touched Rudi’s bandaged abdomen. He did not wince. “The local’s taken effect, Dr. Howson,” she said quietly.

“Fine.” With an effort Howson returned to the work in hand.

Rudi!

Yes… ? A pure conscious note of interrogation, blended with assent and willingness to co-operate now he had sensed the telepathist’s power.

And Howson settled down to find clarity and order in something that was not clear to Rudi himself.

Springing from this fundamental creative urge were the reasons why it could not find an outlet in writing, painting, sculpture, or anything else where the creator was divorced from his audience. Rudi could never be satisfied to devise something and leave other people, elsewhere, to appreciate it. Appreciation fed and renewed his desire to create, as an actor feeds on a “good audience” and rises to new interpretative heights.

And yet acting, again, would be inadequate for Rudi because it was interpretative. So was ballet; so was almost every other form of art in which there was the direct audience contact Rudi craved — although he had been a first-class debater, conjuring up splendid impromptu orations. (Howson had to sift through a dozen such qualifications and explanations before he arrived at a clear picture of what Rudi was actually trying to do.)

Essentially, though, it was music which attracted him most. And-

And Howson found himself on the top of a dizzying slide, lost his grip, and went headlong skidding and slipping into a vast uncharted jungle of interlocked sensory experiences.

Rudi Allef’s mind was almost as far from the ordinary as was Howson’s own, but in a different direction. Somehow, Rudi’s sense-data cross-referred interchangeably. Howson had experience of minds with limited audio-vision — those of people to whom musical sounds called up associated colours or pictures — but compared to what went on in Rudi’s mind that was puerile.

(Once, long before, he had seen a tattered print of Disney’s Fantasia; he had enjoyed it, and had wished there had been more attempts to combine sound and vision in a similar way. Now he was finding out what the combination could be like on the highest level.)

Like a swimmer struggling in a torrential river, Howson sought wildly for solidity in this roaring stream of memory. Images presented themselves: a voice/velvet/a kitten’s claws scratching/purple/ripe fruit — a ship’s siren/fog/steel/yellowish-grey/cold/insecurity/sense of loss and emptiness — a common chord of C major struck on a piano/childhood/wood/ black and white overlaid with bright gold/hate/something burning/tightness about the forehead/shame/stiffness in the wrists/liquidity/roundness…

There was virtually no end to that one. Howson drew back a little and tried again.

He was walking through a forest of ferns a hundred feet high with gigantic animals browsing off their bark; he was rather tired, as if he had come a long way, and the sun was extremely hot. But he came to a blue river and became an icefloe bobbing on a gentle current, melting slowly into the water around. He/the water plunged over a precipice; the pain of striking rock after rock in the long descent was somehow satisfying and fulfilling because he was standing back watching the white spray as he flowed down and there was solidity being worn away as the water eroded the underlying rocks and the spray diffused out with vastness and blackness and far down below a sensation of warmth and redness not seen but imagined (infra-redness ?) as though he was on an airless world with a red sun, a giant red sun, crawling over the horizon to turn into something scuttering and four-legged on an endless black plain which was only a few feet across and around which giants, unheeding, went about their business with bass footsteps and bass voices—

Only all the time he was listening to an orchestra.

Howson felt very tired. Someone was slapping his cheeks gently with a towel dipped in ice-water. He opened his eyes and found he was still on the chair by Rudi’s bed.

“Are you all right?” said Clara anxiously, peering over the shoulder of the nurse who was wielding the wet towel. “You—you were frightened—?”

“How long was I away?” demanded Howson in a hoarse voice.

“It’s been nearly three hours,” said the surgeon, glancing at her watch.

“Less than I thought — still, you were right to pull me back.” Howson got gingerly to his feet and took a step to ease the pins-and-needles in his legs. He glanced at Clara.

What did you make of it?

I don’t quite know… There was a lot of fear.

Your own. Howson frowned. Something wouldn’t come clear to consciousness — something he had half-sensed in the chaos of Rudi’s mental imagery. Still, it was no good trying to rush things. He spoke aloud to the surgeon.

“Thank you for letting me study him. I hope I haven’t put a strain on him. Would you check how well he stood it, and say how soon you think he’ll be able to face full-scale therapy?”

“Are you proposing to treat him here?” said the surgeon. She was torn between being flattered that a curative telepathist of such renown should want to work here, and annoyance at the intrusion of an outsider. Flattery won; Howson made gently sure of that.

She checked Rudi thoroughly and swiftly. “Pulse strong—blood-pressure not too bad — respiration fair…” She rolled back an eyelid and flashed a light into the pupil. “Yes, Dr. Howson, he seems to have stood up to it well. He should be strong enough for you in — well, at a fair guess, a week to ten days.”

Howson repressed his disappointment. He wanted to get to grips with Rudi’s fascinating mind as soon as possible. How would he contain himself for a full week after the tantalizing glimpse of riches in that mental store ?

Well, that would have to take care of itself.

He and Clara found a restaurant near the hospital and sat long over a meal and several cups of coffee, while he sorted out his memories of Rudi’s mind and put them up clearly and in order for her to inspect But the prolonged strain began to mist her perception, so they reverted to words at last.

“Poor Rudi,” Clara said, absently stirring emptiness in her coffee-cup. “No wonder he was so frustrated… How can he ever hope to communicate with an audience?’

“Oh, I know he recognizes that no one else shares precisely his association of one sensation with another. In one sense, a telepathist is the only ideal audience for him. But consciously he would be satisfied if he could create a passable objective facsimile of his mental images, to which his audience could add their own associations. What he can’t reconcile himself to is the fact that, since practically no one else can perform feats of mental cross-connexion on such a grand scale, no one has ever seen exactly what he was driving at”

“Until you ?” suggested Clara.

“Until me. Put it in concrete terms. You’ve mentioned his run-in with the university authorities. I take it he was doing experimental composition of some kind, though not the kind of thing the authorities expected — right ?”

Clara nodded. “Some of it was really weird! But they might have put up with that. The main trouble came when he enlisted Jay Home’s support. He started, as they said, interfering with Jay’s own work, which is far more accessible, and they warned him not to take up so much of Jay’s time. That was what sparked the row and led to the cancellation of his grant. At least, so Charma told me — I’ve known her longer than Jay.”